Brief Encounter

A remarkably watchable Anglo-Indian lesson in moral realities without any moralizing

Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…

Just imagine what you would get if the director of Trainspotting turned his hand to romantic comedy and, sure enough, that’s pretty much what you get with Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary. As with Trainspotting and their earlier hit, Shallow Grave, Boyle is joined by Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (writer), but by…

Please note that the star in this case has a very special meaning. This is that if you have strong nerves and are not subject to nightmares—and you live in one of the few places where Funny Games by the Austrian director Michael Haneke can be seen—by all means go to see it. But don’t…

There are two problems with Forces of Nature, which was written by Marc Lawrence and directed by Bronwen Hughes: the script and the stars. The script, in turn, has two problems: not enough jokes (though several of the jokes there are are good ones) and a moral tendency that pulls away from its dramatic tendency—something…

Is it the cultural and linguistic divide between Anglo and Hispanic America which makes the humor in this movie so hard for me to find, or is it just an awful movie?